Artificial intelligence is changing the face of plastic surgery

You've probably read that artificial intelligence is transforming medicine. While the field has yet to reach its full potential, researchers are exploring ways that machine learning, a subset of AI, can dramatically improve patient outcomes. Machine learning is ultimately about understanding large amounts of data, making it an important tool for handling the flood of electronic data available to health care workers. With the ubiquity of smartphones, image data is more abundant than ever. Computers are often better than humans at identifying patterns, which makes them particularly strong allies in highly visual fields such as plastic and reconstructive surgery, where they can detect, diagnose, monitor, and assess patient outcomes.